by It was a big weekend for women in comedy at the 2020 Writer Guild Association’s awards festivities, held as usual in both New York City and Los Angeles. Because writers can’t afford to all travel to one place? Or more likely because the WGA itself has separate East and West branches. Anyhow. Not the point of this post!
The point is to celebrate women in comedy!
Paula Pell won the Herb Sargent Award, and Amy Poehler presented (with Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch and more of Pell’s friends and former colleagues in attendance). Full speeches galore!
Laraine Newman feted Merrill Markoe for her winning the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for TV.
And Diane Keaton presented Nancy Meyers with the Screen Laurel Award.
As for the regularly scheduled annual competitions in TV writing, the winners included:
TV series: “Barry,” written by Alec Berg, Duffy Boudreau, Bill Hader, Emily Heller, Jason Kim, Taofik Kolade, Elizabeth Sarnoff (HBO)
Episodic comedy: “Pilot” (“Dead to Me”), written by Liz Feldman (Netflix)
Animation: “Thanksgiving of Horror” (“The Simpsons”), written by Dan Vebber (FOX)
Comedy/Variety Talk Series: “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” senior writers: Dan Gurewitch, Jeff Maurer, Jill Twiss, Juli Weiner Writers: Tim Carvell, Daniel O’Brien, John Oliver, Owen Parsons, Charlie Redd, Joanna Rothkopf, Ben Silva, Seena Vali (HBO)
Comedy/Variety Special: “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Presents: Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Part 2,” head writer Melinda Taub; writing supervised by Joe Grossman, Nicole Silverberg; writers Samantha Bee, Kristen Bartlett, Pat Cassels, Sean Crespo, Mike Drucker, Mathan Erhardt, Lewis Friedman, Miles Kahn, Sahar Rizvi; special material by Allison Silverman (TBS)
Comedy/Variety Sketch Series: “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson,” written by Jeremy Beiler, Zach Kanin, Tim Robinson, John Solomon (Netflix)
Congrats to the winners